“Honestly, I was pretty freaked out when I first saw the prosthetic vagina,” Betty Gilpin told the Los Angeles premiere crowd for Office Romance, describing one of the film’s most talked‑about sequences. Gilpin, who plays Jennifer Lopez’s assistant in the Netflix comedy, said the moment triggered a cascade of on‑set mechanics and emotions that most viewers will never see behind the final cut.
She laid out the mechanics in plain, blunt terms. “My real legs were below a table, [I had] fake prosthetic legs, and then a puppeteer was standing at my real legs pushing an animatronic baby out of my prosthetic vagina, and it made it sound like [Gilpin makes a popping sound]…It was insane,” she said, drawing laughter and incredulous looks from the premiere audience.
Gilpin said the scene pushed her past a threshold before she found a way through it. “I had a nervous breakdown and then I was like, ‘Oh, but I’ll be holding the ultimate working mom’s hand, Jennifer Lopez, so what could go wrong?’” That choice — to lean into the moment with Lopez beside her — is the human detail she singled out as the anchor for performing a sequence that relied heavily on props, puppetry and mechanical effects.
The technical choreography she described did not end with the baby. Gilpin recounted the reset process that followed each take: “The saddest part was when the scene was over and everybody but the puppeteers stayed in the room because the only way to reset was to go under and pull the fake placenta — I think the placenta is not in the movie anymore – but reach up through the prosthetic vagina that I am still zipped into, pull the placenta back and take the umbilical cord and pull it back and then pull the baby back through, and then it was time to do it again.” That detail — the necessity of pulling a fake placenta back through the prosthetic — undercuts the tidy notion that the moment was purely cinematic illusion.
Yet Gilpin also said the placenta is “not in the movie anymore,” a friction point she raised herself: the props and the resets she described were part of how the sequence was filmed, but not all of those elements, she says, survived to the final Netflix cut. The admission leaves open a clear question for viewers and critics: how much of that mechanical choreography remains on screen, and how much was trimmed in editing?
The scene’s odd blend of humor and physicality extended into Gilpin’s off‑hand comments at the premiere. She mimicked the momentary sound the puppetry made and joked about the stakes of speaking plainly about social media in a film crowd: “I’m scared to get a neck dart,” she quipped, later adding the throwaway, “I love lamp.” Those asides undercut nothing of the sequence’s logistical complexity but softened the recounting into something performative and human.
Office Romance is directed by Ol Parker, co‑written by Brett Goldstein, who also appears in the film as the company’s in‑house lawyer, and stars Jennifer Lopez as an airline CEO. The film is available on Netflix, where audiences can now judge for themselves what remains of the birthing scene after editing removed, by Gilpin’s account, the fake placenta.
Gilpin’s turn at the premiere served both as a revealing production anecdote and a brief performance: an actor narrating the physical oddities of her job while signalling how she got through them. She will next appear in Aaron Sorkin’s Social Reckoning, playing an editor to Jeff Horwitz, who is portrayed by Jeremy Allen White. For anyone unsettled by the behind‑the‑scenes description, the only definitive answer to how the filmed sequence plays now is to watch Office Romance on Netflix and see which of those prosthetic and puppetry details survive in the finished scene.
